A Simple Organizational Tip from the Most Disorganized Man on Earth

This will be short. So…I was watching Ralph Barsi’s Dreamforce presentation: “Sales Development Professionals Must Represent” and the first thing he told the audience was an instruction: “Draw a line down the middle of the page. On one side takes notes and on the other side write down the action items you are going to go act on immediately.” (Not an exact quote). Anyway, Ralph is not the “Most Disorganized Man on the Face of the Earth”, that would be me…The point of this post is the fact that his tip of splitting the page in half is something I have done for years. Before we move on, here is the video of his presentation.

As mentioned before the video, I do the same thing. And as a matter of fact, I use the “Heinz Marketing” notepad. And as Matt can attest, I ask him for extra notepads every couple months. It’s broken up nicely with a notes side, a “stuff to do” section, and a funnel. The funnel I rarely use, but I do like having it since, well, you know the whole Funnelholic thing…I take notes on the left, write action items on the right. It’s perfect for me. I transfer action items to an uber notepad later. (I don’t use automation to track tasks, i tried it but it is better for me to write them down.”

The only other tip I will provide here is to always save time at the end of meetings to re-iterate action items and get people to agree to them. I have now seen 1000’s of situations where the note take misunderstood what was being said and went off to do the wrong thing.

Thanks Matt and Ralph.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic and a co-founder of Topo. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter